Camerapedia:Community Discussions
Flickr Group Camerapedia Flickr Group Including Images in this Wiki We need to have a clear statement about what licenses we require and how you're supposed to tag/include images in this wiki. Right now we're primarily hotlinking camera images from Flickr (which is fine to do), but I think we also need to give credit to the photographer in the case of Creative Commons licenses. We might want to see how the big Wikipedia handles all this. --Lbstone 15:02, 31 January 2006 (EST) : I just noticed this Adding Images page. Need to look at it more. We need to make sure we give credit to Creative Commons images. Basically all the CC licenses require attribution. --Lbstone 15:00, 5 February 2006 (EST) : currently, i'm deciding against getting direct images from people, i would like users to the person's page, is this good? --toxpose.com Templates or Categories This has been something that I've wondered about for a while... On pages like the Fuji FinePix V10 page we have a template at the bottom of the page. This is an idea that I started a while ago, but I wonder if it's a better idea to use categories rather than this kind of template. Any thoughts? --Lbstone 01:57, 21 January 2006 (EST) : I think both are good: categories are useful for some types of listings, and it would probably be good to have a Category for Fuji cameras, Canon cameras, and so on. On the other hand, templates allow you to have links to the most prominent articles on the same theme, for example the template (see Template:Olympus classic) acts like a menubar. --Rebollo fr 08:06, 21 January 2006 (EST) :: Yeah, both seems fine. --Lbstone 13:28, 29 January 2006 (EST) camera reviews What about a list with sources of camera reviews? : I can't think of a good reason not to do this. I say give it a try and we'll see if it works. --Lbstone 13:27, 29 January 2006 (EST) Pages to be deleted I have created a list of Pages to be deleted, so anybody can put them there, with the reason why it should be deleted. --Rebollo fr 15:41, 30 January 2006 (EST) : Great idea! --Lbstone 15:07, 31 January 2006 (EST) Standards Started a page for Standards information/basic guides for article writing. Skip 02:45, 1 February 2006 (EST) : Good idea. I've also thought about having a standard template for basic camera specs. For example, go to the University of Oxford page in the big Wikipedia... hit the edit tab... then notice the Infobox_University template. This template allows you to just populate certain variables and it will automatically create a formatted "information box" for you. This method could be very helpful for displaying basic camera specs like the ones in your Standards page. --Lbstone 11:07, 1 February 2006 (EST) :: I played around with the template a bit, got something basic going, couldn't get the paramaters to not display unless they're used, but a decent start... Camera Template, used it here --Skip 07:10, 2 February 2006 (EST) ::: That is great! You can get rid of } by typing |battery=|, for example, but that lets the Battery: line. It would be great if you could switch a line on or off, but I doubt it is possible. ::: I have made some propositions in the discussion page of the template. --Rebollo fr 11:34, 2 February 2006 (EST) :::: This is very, very nice! I think we're really onto something here. ;) --Lbstone 09:24, 4 February 2006 (EST) ::I added some more stuff to the Template - help me out here if there's too much or too little. Some of the sections I added are for digital cameras only, but of course one can delete the unnecessary sections as one likes according to the camera on the specific article page. -- Simonides 02:12, 5 February 2006 (EST) ::: I created a Template:Infobox Camera that has changes that I would recommend. I think it's best to have longer more descriptive variable names... that way there's less confusion. I also like prefixing the "infobox" templates with the word Infobox. --Lbstone 16:15, 5 February 2006 (EST) One page for each camera? For old cameras, I have intended to write one page for a family of cameras, instead of one page per camera. It is easier to write the story of the family with all the variants, than to have many pages like this: "the ' blabla II super' is the same as the blabla II with the exposure range extended to ISO 1600". For example I have pointed the zillion Canon rangefinder models before the VT to one Canon II/III/IV page only. I am unsure about more modern models. What is your opinion about this? Should we have a general policy? --Rebollo fr 11:34, 2 February 2006 (EST) : This is actually something that will become an issue in the future. I can see how different websites and services will want to interface with the Camerapedia, and much of the time they'll want to interface/reference each camera on an individual basis (not as a group.) Having an overview of several related cameras is fine, but I absolutely do think that we'll need each camera to have it's very own page (and unique URL) as this project grows. --Lbstone 09:48, 4 February 2006 (EST) :: Do you think a redirect from each name to the group page would be sufficient? For example Olympus OM-1 redirected to Olympus OM-1/2/3/4. --Rebollo fr 11:00, 4 February 2006 (EST) ::: I think a redirect is fine for now. Eventually, though, I know we'll need to have the individual pages (even if they're not terribly big.) --Lbstone 15:26, 5 February 2006 (EST) Maker's name in the page title? Some pages have the maker's name in the title, others do not. For some cameras, we obviously need the maker's name, for example the Nikon F page could not be simply F. In other cases, the model name is more common than the maker's name: Ihagee Exakta, KW Praktica, OPL Foca, Plaubel Makina. For a direct search in the site, a page named Exakta will be more useful than Ihagee Exakta. -- Rebollo fr 11:01, 4 February 2006 (EST) : I agree that in cases like Nikon F we should use Nikon F rather than F. This is good to avoid any ambiguity that may arise. I also think the page should reflect what most people call the camera. I agree with you about using Exakta rather than Ihagee Exakta. But it would also be helpful to have Ihagee Exakta redirect to Exakta. --Lbstone 16:27, 5 February 2006 (EST) :: Also, this relates to the Main Page discussion about camera makers vs. top brands. --Lbstone 16:47, 5 February 2006 (EST) Photography History and Photographers? Should this wiki incorporate information on Photography History (Wet Collodion Process, rise of portraiture, birth of colour technology), and famous Photographers like Alfred Eisenstaedt, Elliot Erwitt, Robert Capa and so forth, or stick to it's namesake as mainly a camera repository rather than Photography in general? While the site is still reasonably small at this stage, I don't think it'd hurt to encourage adding information like this. Skip 02:50, 1 February 2006 (EST) : I can't think of a good reason for not having this information. In fact, it may come in very handy later on if we ever need to reference this information from other articles. I believe that historical context is important. So, yeah... go for it! --Lbstone 10:59, 1 February 2006 (EST) :: How should photos of the photographer be handled, as well as the photos taken, for examples Eisenstaedt's V-J day kiss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vj_day_kiss.jpg)? Would we need to scan the images from a published work, similar to taking a photo of our cameras, or is it ok to link to them externally for things like this? --Skip 03:52, 7 February 2006 (EST) List of templates I have added a list of templates. -- Rebollo fr 16:10, 3 February 2006 (EST) Features Template Hi, I noticed that the camera pages here don't follow the same formatting standards and each has a different look. I guess most people here are familiar with dpreview.com - besides their reviews, one of the great things about the site is how they organize and present their information. Each page follows a lot of templates which makes both reader comparison and writing/editing easier - for instance, look at the comparison chart between the recently preview Olympus E-330 and the Olympus E-300 here: E-330 PREVIEW I tried to copy the code here, but it doesn't look quite the same and the code is huge. Besides, it's not really fair to copy their template outright. However, we could all probably do with some sort of similar "Specifications Table" template for all camera pages (at least all the SLR cameras) and also outline the basic headers and their order for a typical page - for ex. : Introduction (ie salient features, with date of release etc), Specifications, Historical Notes (if any - just an idea), Tips (also an idea), External Reviews, Sample Image Galleries (links to pbase.com or some such site with a database of images that can be sorted by camera). Thoughts/comments welcome. -- Simonides 00:42, 4 February 2006 (EST) : Indeed. We're actually talking about this in the Standards section of this page. :) Check out the Canon_EOS_Rebel_T2 page for an example of the template. --Lbstone 09:36, 4 February 2006 (EST) :: Thanks, I'll try editing that template to include other stuff! -- Simonides 01:44, 5 February 2006 (EST) Is Camerapedia affiliated with Wikipedia? Wow, I just noticed that the Camerapedia articles have no relation to the Wikipedia camera articles - and yet I came here through the latter and was making suggestions for those articles. What is going on, shouldn't they all be unified? -- Simonides 02:33, 5 February 2006 (EST) : This Camerapedia isn't affiliated with the big Wikipedia at all. I created the Camerapedia, because I read some discussions on Wikipedia where people had complained that the Wikipedia is supposed to be a general encyclopedia and that it shouldn't contain articles on every single camera. The goal of Camerapedia on the other hand is to actually contain articles on every single manufactured camera. : If there's any confusion that exists, I'd like to figure out how to address it. How did you get sent here from Wikipedia? I don't want people to mistakenly think that Camerapedia is affiliated with Wikipedia. If you have any suggestions, let me know. --Lbstone 10:15, 5 February 2006 (EST) ::Wikipedia has articles on every single Pokemon character and every Star Trek episode. Why not every camera? -- Mav ::: Check out the List of Products section of Wikipedia's Nikon Corporation Talk page. Egil says, "In terms of listing products, I believe we should be careful. Only products that are very significant and noteworthy should be listed. I guess that would probably amount to a couple or a few of products, over the history. Maintaing a list of current products is totally outside the scope of Wikipedia." I remember seeing similar sentiment in other places too, but I forget where. My understanding is that Wikipedia articles should be kept "encyclopedic" and I don't want to have those constraints here. In particular, we also have various definitions and glossary terms that aren't supposed to be in Wikipedia. See Wikipedia is not a Dictionary. ::: In addition I plan to eventually create an API based off of the Camerapedia's MySQL database that will allow any website to interface directly with our data... This will allow programmers to have access to a comprehensive camera database for use in tons of applications. To my knowledge, this wouldn't really be possible with Wikipedia. ::: In any event, if you have any other thoughts, feel free to share. I'm really just trying to help create something that I've personally wanted to see exist. Besides, in the end Wikipedia and Camerapedia can certainly share information (just as long as there is proper attribution), so I think we're all more-or-less on the same team... even though these are separate projects. --Lbstone 12:38, 6 February 2006 (EST) Helpful Wiki Syntax I created a section in the page with some useful tips. This is the page that is linked next to the "save page" button on every edit screen. Add more tips as you see fit. --Lbstone 16:17, 5 February 2006 (EST)